Rolling Thunder

Concussive thunder wakes me, hammering rain, but I see, by the lightning, that this cell is SE of me, and as my power comes in from the NW, I'm not too concerned. Even when the rain gives over to pea-sized hail and the noise is something awful, I'm not too worried about my connection, because the storm is moving away. Now that the trees are leafed out, I'm not even concerned about the driveway, because every ounce of moisture is sucked up into spring growth. My anxiety is more general, the heat-death of the universe. But that probably doesn't affect me in more than a peripheral way. I'm dead anyway, by the law of averages, so what would I care? There is a moment, when it's hailing to beat the band, that I'm a little anxious, but it tails off into nothingness, frogs in the puddles on the driveway. I don't pretend to any particular position when it comes to the ways of the world, I just try to keep my head above water. Tenuous connections, at best. but it's good to stay abreast of the situation. Purely by chance, I'm looking deep into the cleavage of some push-up bra reality. I don't want to play the game. I tell those people close to me that I'm no longer a player, I don't want to deal with it, the role-changing, the bullshit. Please, just let me rot in my tree-tip pit. More rolling thunder, I'd better go. Circuitous route. This meaning that. With this rain and cooler weather there could be another flush of late morels. Power was out because my digital clock was blinking when I got home. Skip Fox just called, one of the best writers in the language, and he has a new Selected Poems coming out from University Of Louisiana press. He was checking that my snail mail address was still the same. Nice extended conversation. Talked about punctuation. He reads me every day, and I have four of his books out on the table in front of the sofa. He's a gifted writer. We talked about projects. He's doing a lot, works harder than I do. We agreed there was a certain reverie, every time we used a comma. A nice break, the whole conversation was one I could only have with a handful of people. Reminded of that time in Rest, Virginia, when I only talked to four people: B, called him twice a week, the owner of a used book store, with whom I did some reciprocal trading, and two crazy doctors. I wrote a great book that winter, and moved here the following spring, longer than I've ever lived anyplace. Here, the ridge. Not to draw to fine a point.